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The rented Škoda’s engine cut off with a resigned shudder, leaving only the brittle ticking of its cooling components and the perpetual, distant thrash of Glencar Waterfall somewhere beyond the trees. Corinne let her hands linger on the steering wheel, the vinyl’s synthetic grain biting faintly into her callused palms. She stared out the windshield at the milky, overcast morning, only half the day gone and already the sky had settled into a relentless grey. Mist hung in the air, as thick as the engine’s ghost, slowly congealing on the car’s pitted hood. She let out a measured breath, the sort of exhale that pretended at calm but left the inside of her chest clenched and shivering. For a long minute, she sat in the driver’s seat, absorbing the subtle music of this unfamiliar country: the slow drip of water from the car’s undercarriage, the lowing complaint of distant cattle, the shrill punctuation of a magpie somewhere up the slope. The hum of rainless dampness was so complete it seemed manufactured, a soundproofed silence to insulate her from herself.
She had not planned to come here. Ireland, yes, but not the waterfall—her itinerary had been rigorously minimal: hike, eat, sleep, avoid other Americans, and in the seams between, try to stitch together a plausible next step for her life. Yet last night the name “Glencar” had appeared unbidden on her phone, a search history she didn’t recall inputting. She’d assumed it a bug, a spectral suggestion courtesy of whatever algorithm now tracked her every move. And because her logic still worked in the familiar patterns of compulsion and defiance, she’d pointed her car north at dawn, eating up kilometers until the world outside turned feral, ancient.
She opened the door. She could taste the mist as it coiled in, metallic and mossy at the back of her throat. She zipped her fleece to the chin, adjusted her pack, and ducked out into the air—immediately colder and wetter than she’d imagined. The car locked itself behind her, a metallic click that sounded final. The parking area was little more than a worn patch of gravel. Her rental was the only vehicle; the single bicycle chained to the rusted rack looked abandoned, its seat slick with water. Trees ringed the lot, the encroaching ash and oak leaning inward as though hoping to reclaim the cleared space. Somewhere beyond that green-black barrier waited the waterfall, its voice already louder now that she was outside. With practiced motions, she pulled her braid tight at the nape of her neck. Even after a year, the sight of her own hands doing this—nails short and practical, knuckles still thick—provoked a complicated ache. The hands didn’t look like her mother’s, nor her own from five years ago; they belonged to the present and to nobody. At least her hair had finally grown long enough to wrangle. She tucked a loose strand behind her ear and reminded herself that this was not a day for rumination.
The trailhead was marked by a sign so faded its letters had melted into palimpsest: GLENCAR WATERFALL, and then, in smaller, almost apologetic font, FÁILTE. The path itself was mud and scattered gravel, bordered with opportunistic ferns that threatened to topple into the rut at any moment. She shouldered her pack and started forward, boots sinking with every step. The mist thickened as she left the car behind; droplets formed on her eyelashes, blurry and cold. It didn’t take long for the forest to close in. The trees here grew in ways that made her think of old men, trunks twisted with intent, limbs tangled and arthritic above her head. As the trail wound deeper, the canopy grew dense enough to blot out the pale sun entirely. The sound of the waterfall became omnipresent, an animal’s breath that seemed to come from everywhere at once. She kept moving, letting the rhythm of her footfalls anchor her to the present.
Corinne Quinn, contorted to fit an old last name, old habits, in borrowed clothes and a borrowed country—who was she, here on the edge of the world, three thousand miles from the righteous, burrowing voices of her family and the Appalachian hills? Not the trembling, half-made creature of last December. But not exactly the woman in her passport, either. The trees here didn’t care. They pressed in, vast, knuckled, multiplying with every step she took into the deepening forest.
Moss crept up the bases of the trees, luxuriant and slick, making the trunks look half-dissolved. Roots arched across the path, some as thick as her thigh, others hidden just beneath the mud, waiting to catch her. It felt less like a nature walk and more like moving through the lungs of something ancient and slowly suffocating. She hesitated at a fork in the trail, where the ground gave way to what looked like a dry streambed, choked with rocks and tangled roots. Instinct told her the main path led left, toward the posted tourist overlook. She went right.
As she walked, memories of her former life flickered like shadows- faces of family and friends, their judgments forming a weight in her chest heavier than the pack on her shoulders. Voices she’d tried to outpace for years whispered in the back of her skull: too much, too strange, too wrong, too broken to be loved by God or kin. The Appalachian hills had kept the echoes close, tight as a coffin lid. Here, the wind pulled them loose. She breathed in damp earth, peat, rot, green. The air felt clean enough to scrape her raw and maybe—if she let it—carve something new. She didn’t know yet what she was supposed to become. She only knew she couldn’t stay who she had been.
The air grew colder, and the mist began to taste metallic, with a mineral tang that conjured visions of wet iron and blood. She thought about her last name, the one she still hadn’t chosen. The government form had sat on her laptop for weeks, cursor blinking after “Corinne.” She liked the idea of naming herself, but none of the options she’d tried on felt real. “Quinn” was what she settled on, what she chose in the moment. She had a fleeting thought of another name; one she almost imagined she could hear on the wind. The fog carried it away, dissolved it.
Up ahead, the streambed rose and then dipped into a hollow so thick with trees that it looked like dusk had arrived all at once. The roar of the waterfall had faded, replaced by a kind of smothered silence. Corinne slowed, boots squelching in the soft loam. Every step forward felt both illicit and necessary. Then she felt it: a subtle shiver at the nape of her neck, like stepping into a room still echoing with tears. The forest had rearranged itself; the familiar hush now carried expectations. Corinne halted. Around her, slick trunks stood tall, needles shaking off beads of rain. She turned slowly, scanning the green gloom. No footprints, no voices, no shape to be seen—yet something lingered, a silent pressure between her shoulder blades, watching without eyes. She swallowed hard, scolding herself for paranoia—new land, foul weather, exhaustion. But as she moved on, her heartbeat thundered in her ears, drowning out the rustle of leaves. Each pulse reverberated in her ribs like a summons. The woods fell eerily quiet, as if holding their breath.
A cold crawled up her spine, prickling her skin as though the trees themselves leaned in, alive with unseen gaze. Boundaries between her body and the forest blurred until she felt observed by an ancient, knowing presence. Rain pattered on her hood. Something foreign brushed the edge of her mind. Then a flicker of shadow materialized in the mist- at first nothing more than a shiver in the periphery, a suggestion of shape between two trees.
Then she saw it fully: a wolf. It was simply there, as if the world had grown around it in the time it took her to blink. Massive, blacker than the forest’s own shadow, it stood with front legs braced on the mossy mound above the hollow. Its fur was so dark it seemed to drink the remaining light, but along its muzzle and down its throat were streaks of red, like dried blood. Its head was broad, ears pricked and deliberate, eyes twin moons of pale gold. They found and settled upon her, unblinking. She froze. She’d heard all the stories about Ireland’s wolves, how they’d been hunted to extinction centuries ago. Maybe this was a trick of the fog, some farmer’s oversized dog escaped into the wild. But no domestic animal ever moved with such impossible silence, such premeditated stillness. Muscles rippled beneath thick fur. Its golden eyes fixed on her- calm, unblinking, intelligent. No hunger, no fear- only a silent scrutiny that rooted her to the spot.
She opened her mouth. No sound came out.
The wolf didn’t snarl or even shift its stance. It just looked. Its gaze washed over her with the weight of judgment, and in that golden appraisal she felt herself rendered down to truth. Not Corinne of the hiking boots and rental car. Not even Corinne Quinn, would-be self-made woman. Just Corinne, naked to the ancient wild, stripped of story. The moment stretched, breathless and brittle. Her heart hammered, the pulse a thrumming warning behind her ears. She tried to back away, managed a single step before her heel caught on a hidden root and she pitched backward into the mud. The shock was electric, jarring her back into her body.
She scrambled to her feet, heart stuttering. The wolf had not moved, but now its lips had drawn back ever so slightly, exposing the suggestion of fangs. There was no growl, but a kind of humming filled the air, like the vibration of distant thunder.
She turned and ran.
The trail dissolved beneath her pounding feet. Roots jutted like waiting knuckles, mist blurred her vision, and wet branches lashed at her arms. Every stride was a battle against the weight of her past and the uncertainty ahead. Her lungs burned as if inhaling the very fog around her. She never dared to look back. She ran until even that, too, became impossible. Her knees gave way before her mind could catch up. She staggered to a halt, panting, doubled over, one hand braced against a rain-slicked tree trunk. Her heart pounded against her ribs. The forest wavered around her—not the trees, but her own vision, fraying at the edges. Eventually, her legs buckled and she slid to the ground, mud coating her palms and the seat of her jeans. She fished her phone from her jacket pocket and tried to wake the screen. Nothing. Either the battery was dead, or the water had finally claimed it. For a while she just stared at the blank glass, its reflection a pale oval of her own frightened face, until the urge to move became greater than her exhaustion.
She picked a direction and started walking, this time slower, careful to listen for any footfalls behind her. The deeper she went, the stranger the woods became. Trees grew at odd angles, some twisted almost horizontal, their limbs crawling over one another like petrified serpents. Patches of fog condensed in the air, so dense in places she had to push through them as though breaking spiderwebs. The air grew still, the rush of the waterfall only a memory now, replaced by a silence so absolute it made her ears ring. She stumbled over a root and went down hard, skinning her palm on a protruding stone. The pain jolted her, clean and immediate, and she hissed through her teeth, pressing the wound to her mouth by reflex. The blood tasted like old coins. She spat, wiped her hand on her jeans, and sat there for a moment, letting the misery wash over her.
That was when she heard a soft, papery rustle, not more than ten feet away. She went rigid, waiting for the wolf to appear, but instead there came a flutter of wings, a dark shape descending with a precision that felt deliberate. A raven landed on a branch not two meters from her head, so massive it bent the limb under its weight. Its feathers absorbed the dim light, turning it an impossible shade of midnight; the only brightness was the oily gleam where the mist settled on its wings. Its eyes were wrong. Not merely bright or clever, but fully aware—obsidian dark flecked with pulsing gold, mirroring the wolf’s gaze and making her stomach drop.
It cawed once—an explosive, almost human sound that made her flinch—and then hopped forward, landing on a lower branch so close she could see the serrated edge of its beak. Clutched in that beak was a ribbon of something red and glistening. At first, she thought it was a piece of garbage, some lost balloon or string, but then the raven opened its jaws, and the object fell to the moss below, making a wet sound as it landed. She looked at the thing. It was a strip of meat, fresh and streaked with blood. Not roadkill; too clean, too deliberate. The raven called again, louder, the note insistent. It cocked its head, then looked pointedly at the offering. When she did not move, it fluffed its feathers and gave a low, chiding growl, as if disappointed in her. She wanted to recoil, to throw the object as far from her as possible. Instead, she knelt and examined it. The meat was still warm, faint steam rising into the cold. Corinne had spent enough time in biology labs to know muscle and sinew, but this was too large for a rodent, too fine-grained for most birds. It looked almost—human. She dropped it with a small sound of disgust, wiped her fingers on the moss, and stepped back. The raven seemed satisfied. It launched itself from the branch, circled above her head once, then arrowed off through the trees, vanishing into the fog. For a moment, Corinne simply stood there, rooted by confusion. Then the bird called again, farther off, and she realized it was waiting for her to follow.
The trail the raven took was no path at all, but the bird reappeared at regular intervals, each time perching somewhere just ahead, its beak open in silent expectation. Corinne followed, boots slipping on the mud, the blood from her scraped palm mixing with the mist until her skin was stained a ruddy brown. She lost track of time. The woods grew less familiar with every step. Stones jutted from the earth like broken teeth, and the trees grew so close together she sometimes had to squeeze sideways to fit. The air was colder now, the mist so dense it sometimes closed over her like a second skin. She started shivering, whether from cold or fear she couldn’t tell.
At one point she stopped, breathless and dizzy, and the raven landed directly above her, dropping another scrap of flesh to the ground. She didn’t touch it this time, but the message was clear: keep going. At last, the forest began to thin. The mist broke apart in ragged gaps, and through one she saw a sliver of sky, bruised violet and, for a second, almost luminous. The raven called, a final time, and then vanished upward, lost in the branches. Corinne staggered forward, the world spinning at the edges of her vision. She emerged into a clearing, unfamiliar but somehow inevitable. The earth here was bare, the soil churned and raw, as if something large had passed through recently. She turned in a slow circle, searching for the bird, the wolf, anything that made sense. The woods were silent. For the first time, she realized she was completely, utterly alone.
She knelt there until her pulse slowed, until her breaths grew regular and, for a moment, nearly calm. When she finally stood, she found herself facing the direction the raven had gone, as if her body already knew what came next. She started walking, and this time, the woods did not fight her. Each footfall seemed to resonate with the pulse of the earth, the air thickening with anticipation as the sound of rushing water crescendoed, pulling her forward like an unseen tide. Mist began to curl around her ankles, swirling upward to envelop her, a baptism into the unknown. Here lay the turning point—a threshold she could no longer ignore.
The raven reappeared, this time on the ground, picking at something in the moss with brisk, surgical movements. When it noticed her, it gave a curt, businesslike croak and hopped forward, leading her down a barely-there decline carpeted with velvet-green. The curtain of trees parted without warning, and the world opened into a clearing so suddenly it made her stumble. Glencar Waterfall loomed ahead, neither distant nor near, but present in a way that made it impossible to look anywhere else. The water crashed from a ragged lip of rock, forty or fifty feet above, and hit the pool below in a constant living detonation. Mist arched up from the impact, carrying a cold shock that prickled her cheeks and filled her lungs with raw oxygen. The light, though scant, was caught and spun through the spray in momentary, fractured rainbows—colors that existed nowhere else in the world but here, at this exact angle and hour.
The raven darted forward, landed on a lichen-crusted boulder near the water’s edge, and preened its chest as if it had only now remembered the importance of appearances. Corinne followed, boots sliding on the slick stones, her clothes heavy with moisture. She was halfway to the boulder before she realized she was not alone. The wolf stood at the far end of the clearing, a black statue outlined in the perpetual drizzle. It had not moved since she last saw it—she was certain of this, the same precise posture, head high, ears forward—but the gaze had changed. It was less an animal’s glare and more an invitation: a challenge to see who would break the stare first. But the wolf was not the only watcher.
Between the animal and the waterfall, at the place where the rock formed a natural dais, stood a figure draped in a cloak so dark it seemed to peel the light away from everything nearby. The hood was drawn low, obscuring any trace of face or hair, but the shape beneath was unmistakably female—tall and narrow-hipped, arms folded beneath the folds of fabric. The cloak itself was a mystery: its surface shimmered in the mist, and every so often Corinne thought she saw the patterns of distant stars and swirling, silent galaxies stitched into the blackness. When the wind caught the hem, it revealed nothing of feet or shadow, just a deeper dark.
She stopped, uncertain whether to approach or retreat. The raven, impatient, flapped to her shoulder and tugged sharply at her hair, then returned to its post atop the boulder, waiting. The wolf did not move, but Corinne felt a new intensity in its regard, as if it were studying not her body but the shape of her fear. The figure raised a hand from within the folds of the cloak, the gesture at once regal and ineffably familiar. The skin was pale, fingers long, ending in nails that looked more like talons than anything human. Corinne’s breath snagged; she did not recall telling her feet to move, but she was walking forward, boots crunching on the slick gravel as if drawn by a leash of gravity. She stopped within arm’s reach of the dais. The roar of the waterfall made conversation impossible, but the figure’s presence filled the air, as immediate and inescapable as the mist itself.
“Daughter, I see you.” The voice was not loud, yet it carried perfectly above the crash of water—a resonance that bypassed her ears and vibrated in her bones. The words were English, but shadowed with another language beneath, older and unfamiliar.
The wolf paced forward until it flanked the cloaked woman, then sat and regarded Corinne with the implacable patience of royalty. The raven, now silent, watched from the boulder, head cocked. Corinne opened her mouth but found herself unable to speak. Instead, she dipped her head in a gesture that was part bow, part self-protection. The woman unfurled her arms. Beneath the cloak she wore nothing but darkness, a shimmer of black feathers, a glimpse of raw muscle, impossible to focus on. Her face was mostly hidden, but the lower half caught the light: a mouth shaped by centuries of hard judgments, lips the color of old bruises.
“You have come,” she said, as though the arrival was not Corinne’s choice, but an ancient appointment finally kept. “You have run. You have seen. Now you must choose.”
The words arranged themselves inside Corinne, a puzzle box she did not have the key to. She swallowed and managed to force a single word from her mouth: “Choose?”
The woman’s head tilted, the movement eerily like the raven’s. “It is a choice to see, to not avert your gaze. Many run, few arrive. Fewer still stand.”
Corinne was shivering again, but it was not from cold. “What happens if I go back?”
The waterfall’s voice was thunder, and the woman’s answer was a whisper in its wake: “Then you will have never left.”
“I can’t go back,” she said.
A smile, thin and fleeting, crossed the lower half of the woman’s face. “Then step forward. Claim what you are owed.”
Corinne felt her body surge with a sensation both terrifying and exhilarating—a tidal pull, a rush of blood to her fingertips and her lips, as if every inch of her skin had become newly awake. She stepped onto the dais, into the spray of the waterfall. The cold was absolute, but she did not flinch. The woman reached out, and her fingers closed gently around Corinne’s jaw, tilting her face up. The touch was icy and burned at the same time. Corinne wanted to recoil but could not; she was pinned by the gaze from within that hood, by the gold eyes of the wolf, by the silent vigilance of the raven. For a moment, all three were one thing, a single watching presence.
The woman’s thumb traced the line of Corinne’s cheek, pausing at the small scar by her eyebrow. “This is your sign,” she murmured, voice now so intimate it might have been her own thought. “You are marked by passage. Marked by pain. But most of all, by persistence.”
Corinne closed her eyes. Her heartbeat slowed. For a moment, she felt nothing but the pressure of the hand on her skin, the roar of the water, the certainty that she was seen.
The woman leaned close, so the words were a breath against her ear: “You are of my line, if you will it.”
A name vibrated through her, a resonance that settled in her teeth and bones. She opened her eyes and found that the waterfall, the wolf, the raven, and the woman were all watching, expectant.
She swallowed, voice a bare thread: “I will it.”
The woman released her, and Corinne staggered back, nearly slipping on the wet rock. The world sharpened into too many colors- every drop of mist, every vein in the moss, every feather on the raven’s breast. She blinked, and the woman was gone. Only the wolf remained, and it dipped its head, golden eyes narrowed in something like approval. The raven flapped once, leaving her shoulder, and vanished into the woods. The clearing was empty except for her, the waterfall, and the name thrumming inside her.
Corinne stood on the dais for a long time, watching the water and the silent stone. For once, she did not feel compelled to move or run or change. She just stood, seeing the world, and letting the world see her. The waterfall never truly quieted, but when Corinne finally turned to leave the clearing, its voice receded into a gentle, persistent hush, like a memory of ocean surf. Her boots found purchase on the slick stones with ease; the moss that had so recently threatened to swallow her now gripped her soles with a gentle steadiness, guiding rather than impeding. She moved through the trees with a grace that surprised her. The forest seemed changed, or maybe she was—every path that had once felt like a snare now opened before her, as if the undergrowth bent itself out of respect. The mist that had been so thick and hostile in her flight now drifted in thin, luminous sheets, twining harmlessly around her calves and wrists. Each inhalation brought with it the taste of green life, the faint metallic edge of waterfalls and waking blood.
Her mind felt oddly still. The doubts and recursive loops of panic that usually patrolled the inside of her skull were absent, replaced by a sensation she could only compare to a distant, reverberating drum. Her heart beat in time with it, not hurried but determined, marking each moment with a certainty she hadn’t known in years. At the edge of the woods, she paused and looked back, half-expecting to see the wolf or the woman—or the woman as wolf, or wolf as raven, or some other permutation her mind was only just beginning to map. But the clearing was empty, as if no living thing had ever broken its hush. Only the mist moved, coiling upward in delicate, unhurried spirals.
Her car was waiting where she had left it, now beaded with dew. The engine accepted her key on the first try, the sound of ignition almost comically mundane after the waterfall’s cosmic roar. She sat in the driver’s seat, hands trembling only a little as she gripped the wheel. She started the car. The tires crunched on gravel, then found the main road. She checked the rearview mirror once, then again. In the distance, a shadow flickered between the trees, gold eyes bright in the gloom. Corinne did not flinch. She raised her chin, caught her own gaze in the mirror, and nodded. She drove with the windows down, letting the chilly air scrape at her cheeks, and somewhere along the edge of sense she thought she heard the caw of a raven, the low, satisfied growl of a wolf. She did not know what came next. But she knew who she was, and that was enough. The new name fit. It was an inheritance, a wound, a promise.
Morgan. Corrine Morgan.
She repeated it aloud, voice cutting through the hum of tires and wind, and for the first time it sounded like hers. When the mist finally broke, and sunlight pierced the car’s windshield, she laughed—one sharp bark, bright and wild. She pressed the accelerator, and the world spun on.